Imagine a morning spent listening to music, experimenting with different matcha latte recipes, and rereading random chapters from cherished books. Maybe you sneak in an episode or two of your favorite show or hum to yourself while you wash dishes in your cramped apartment kitchen.
Now, let me paint a picture of what a morning lived differently could look like: You wake up in time for an early morning jog, journal on crisp paper, and manage to drink copious amounts of lemon water before the clock strikes 9 am. You meditate and fix yourself a nutritious breakfast.
Which of the above scenarios would you say accomplishes more?Â
Both of these realities have the potential to satisfy whoever lives them. Yet a morning spent like the latter might be a little closer to your idea of wellness and productivity. Why wouldn’t it be? The content we avidly consume online often associates these scenarios with physical health and achievement. Productivity is reduced to working out, maintaining proper skincare, drinking enough water, rinsing, and repeating. Yes, it can be all of those things, but it shouldn’t be limited to them.
What wellness-related media often fails to explicitly acknowledge is that productive output differs for everyone. That is to say, not everyone derives the same satisfaction from doing the same things. We tend to conflate productivity and wellness with tangibility because the easiest way to characterize any sort of output as productive is to look at palpable results. You can track how much protein you’ve consumed with breakfast, but it’s less feasible to quantify the amount of joy gained from, say, memorizing song lyrics. It feels safer to follow cookie-cutter routines that have been deemed motivation-inducing. It’s easier to allocate energy toward something that is widely touted as a good use of one’s time.
Bit by bit, I’ve noticed others slowly veering away from holistic approaches to personal well-being, choosing to push activities that foster creativity and a sense of novelty to the back burner — a phenomenon likely fueled by social media’s incessant digital enforcement of productivity culture.
The morning I described in my opening paragraph is one I’ve enjoyed countless times. If I read three chapters of a wonderfully written book before noon, I consider it a morning well spent. Walking around with Ethel Cain playing in my headphones is an equally wonderful experience. I derive a special kind of clarity from these simple activities, one that other itemized routines simply wouldn’t provide.
To be productive is to do what fulfills you when you can. Whether that means completing a sudoku puzzle, running a half-marathon at dawn, or even reorganizing your kitchen cabinets on a whim, productivity looks different for everyone. So, the next time you compare your disorganized, beautiful, utterly human morning to the polished aesthetics you see online, remind yourself to do what makes you feel ready to tackle the day — not what would look good on a spreadsheet.
